Carl Bernstein On Trump-Russia Collusion: It’s ‘Worse Than Watergate’
Carl Bernstein, one of the two journalists, along with Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate stories that eventually led to the resignation of Republican president Richard Nixon, says Donald Trump’s campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia appears “worse than Watergate,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Speaking in front of a standing crowd in Hyde Park, Bernstein first sought to draw parallels between Trump’s alleged collusion and Watergate. Although he reminded his audience that it was impossible to know where the Mueller investigations will ultimately lead, he said he expected the results to be something far worse than what transpired in American politics during the 1970s under Nixon.
“What Watergate was about at it’s most basic level was a vast campaign of political espionage and sabotage to undermine the democratic political process in this country.
We’ve got to be a little cautious here — we’ve got to see where this goes. But at the same time, we also know that we’re dealing with a situation that appears to be a real feeling that is worse than Watergate in many, many ways, in the sense that we have a president of the United States who lies about almost anything.”
Bernstein then went on to ring the alarm bells, pointing out that the major political difference between Watergate and the Trump-Russia links is the indifference of the Republicans to meaningfully rein in the president and ask him tough questions on Russia. He also underlined the duplicitous manner in which Republicans were saying something else in private but refusing to acknowledge the same things in public.
“What’s so astonishing to me in the last few months is the number of Republicans on the Hill who have said to me privately — and I’m (also) talking to military command and the intelligence community — who say ‘he’s unstable, the president of the United States.’ You would not have heard that about Richard Nixon.
“You can look at parallels… but we’re a different country now — we’re in a state of cold civil war in this country today and it didn’t start with Donald Trump… He’s brought us to the point of near ignition.”
Carl Bernstein: Trump-Russia collusion would be "worse than Watergate" https://t.co/iNaKA24Rps pic.twitter.com/6dxbecCAw2
— The Hill (@thehill) November 3, 2017
Bernstein also appeared to be counting holes in the narrative put forth by the White House, which is that Donald Trump was never informed about campaign member George Papadopoulos’ line of communication with Russian authorities, by pointing out that the defense does not hold water in any logical sense. Even if it’s agreed that Papadopoulos was a “low-level volunteer,” he definitely was in constant touch with campaign manager Paul Manafort about it, he said. Bernstein insinuated that there was only one authority in whom the campaign manager would have confided.
“Papadopoulos was clearly telling Manafort — he was the campaign manager. You gotta ask yourself, ‘Who did Manafort talk to about this?’ I don’t know, but the logic goes a certain way,” he said.
This assumption also seems to have been vindicated by the multiple reports which claim that Trump aide Carter Page told the Senate in a closed-door hearing that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then the head of the foreign policy team, was informed about the Russian contacts, according to CNN. But while Sessions put down the idea of a Trump-Putin meeting by pointing out that it could “leak” on a separate occasion, Trump “heard [Papadopoulos] out,” a former campaign adviser, J.D. Gordon, told the New York Times.
[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
